Memories of Adolescence

                           Memories of Age 14

It was one of those,

‘I’m having the first major testosterone rush of my life!’

‘No! I’M having the first major testosterone rush of MY life!’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Oh, yeah!’

‘Asshole!’

‘Sissy!’,

clumsy punches ending up in a grunting clinch

wrestled to the ground

type of fights.

Y’know?

               Wasteful Dimwittedness

It was 1961.

I was working in a land survey party

for the summer.

Since this was long before GPS

or even laser technology

it involved considerable grunt-work.

The first time I got out of our beat-up old van

at a refuelling stop

I was astounded to see the redneck who was driving

shoot a few squirts of petrol onto the ground

after he’d finished filling the tank.

He explained that he liked to see

the cost of the fill-up be a nice, round number.

I mean, even though gasoline

was only about 25 cents a gallon then

and the company was paying for it, not him,

that still seemed to me

to be about the most pointlessly dumb thing

I’d ever seen and heard in my life.

                 My Bongos and Beret Experiment

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I was dead keen on becoming

a beatnik,

even though, living in a new suburban subdivision,

I’d never met one or to my knowledge even seen one at a distance.

I had, however, read some of their stuff and heaps of stuff about them,

and of course looked at pictures.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I listened to modern jazz

and folk music

as well as to rock & roll and the other crap that was on the radio.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I wrote free verse

and a savagely pessimistic short story that didn’t have a happy ending.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I dreamt of smoking pot and drinking cheap red wine

and of growing a beard.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I bought some bongo drums

because I’d seen some purported beatnik playing a set

to someone reading poetry

in a film clip somewhere,

but nobody would tell me how to play them

and my older sibling sneered when I tried to teach myself.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I bought a beret

because I’d seen pictures of beatniks wearing them,

but I’ve always been horribly allergic to wool,

and it felt like a strip of fire across my forehead.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I decided that I didn’t need to be able to play the bongos

or to wear a beret

in order to be a beatnik.

                             Mass

I was sixteen or seventeen,

and went to the beach

with a carload of friends.

We rented a room,

bought a shitload of beer,

and went out drinking all night.

I remember throwing a beer can

out the car window onto the beach,

thinking poetically

that since I knew that was wrong

it was clear evidence of my fallible humanity.

How the driver kept from crashing the car I’ll never know.

I crashed on a mattress at about dawn, myself.

An hour or so later my good friend John,

whose surname was of course Kennedy,

and who was a huge, brawny broth of a lad,

shook me awake,

telling me it was time to go to fisherman’s mass.

Reminding him that I was Jewish, I told him to go away,

but he physically lifted me to my feet

and dragged me to the church.

Still drunk, not even hung over,

I sat through too many minutes of the Latin mass –

this was the early sixties.

It reminded me of my grandfather’s shul,

where a bunch of old men mumbled prayers in Hebrew,

each at his own pace.

Different, yes,

but I didn’t know what the fuck was going on

at either place.

                             The Yard

Tough young sons and grandsons

of tough immigrants from Naples and vicinity

hung out in the schoolyard

of St Elizabeth’s Parochial High at night,

smoking, spitting, drinking

cheap fortified syrupy-sweet wine,

talking trash,

hoping to find a fight,

preferably unequal,

before the night was through.

Some daughters of conservative,

old-money, socially impeccable,

Anglo-Saxon families

found some members of the Yard

irresistibly attractive –

in a sexual sort of way.

I avoided direct conflict with them, myself,

which took some doing sometimes.

                 Authoritative Advice

The crew was the three of us,

all of us, ranging in age from 18 to 22,

coopted into that cushy summer gig

by having connections in local government,

an ancient and worthy form of corruption.

We drove around all day in a county car,

big, roly-poly Von from Wilmington’s ghetto,

cheerful, upper-class John, and me,

counting houses and other structures,

and coding them on maps and data sheets.

We were, officially, engaged in a ‘land-use survey’.

We also clowned around excessively,

took long, leisurely lunches, and drank beer.

Once or twice Von and John took an hour or so off

to go bowling, but I wasn’t into that.

Once when we were surveying a posh rural district

where the DuPonts and so forth lived,

all green and rolling, like in 19th-century landscape paintings,

with horses and mansions and tree-lined roads,

we stopped for lunch at John’s house,

where his suave upper-crust father,

in expensive leisurewear, served us beer and advice.

‘Boys,’ he told us, ‘always remember this:

there’s nothing as overrated in life as fucking,

and there’s nothing as underrated as a good shit.’

           At Nineteen

When I was at university

many long years ago,

I watched a movie called The Collector,

that won prizes and stuff.

It had layers upon layers

of textured meanings, mostly noir,

and presented deep, subtle

psychological insights.

I remember that what I took with me

when I left the theatre

was mostly a hormonal response

to the female lead.

                               On The Phone, In The Dark

During 1967, the last year of my undergraduate work,

I took to making frequent telephone calls

to various young women, trying to connect with them,

gormless about why it was impossible.

I was vaguely aware

of being good-looking and broad-shouldered,

intelligent and creative,

but was still in the dark about

my being psychologically damaged beyond repair,

and would be so for another forty years or so more.

               Sixties Student Sleaze

We shared an apartment, but I didn’t know him.

He spent every weekend with his parents,

who were friends of my aunt.

She was a friend of my girlfriend.

I don’t know how he met her.

It was a shotgun apartment,

so I had to walk through his bedroom

to get from the bathroom or the kitchen

to the front room or the front door.

One afternoon, whilst in transit,

I couldn’t help but notice them fucking.

She kept shouting his name.

I kept walking.

I was playing an LP and smoking a joint

when the noise from his room stopped.

Then one of them – I forget which –

came into the front room

and invited me to take part in Round Two.

And so she shouted my name

for however long we kept it up,

just as she’d shouted his.

Then, when we got to the short rolls

she reached down and grabbed my scrotum.

Nobody had ever done that to me before.

When I was pulling on my clothes

she stayed lying on his bed,

calling out both our names.

Callow and clueless as I was,

it wasn’t an experience that I savoured.

Love Stuff Continued

              Love and Me

Okay, I do realise that I learnt

when just a wee lad

that I’m undeserving of love,

and that now that I’m old and grumpy

and no longer exuding pheromones

that it’s out of the question,

but I still crave it nonetheless.

                   The Death of Love

After she snarled loudly and almost wordlessly at him

in front of the supermarket’s pastry fridge

as he turned, shaking his head,

without picking anything up

and headed for the eggs,

people nearby began to stare.

He stopped, turned,

put his hands up in the universal surrender signal,

and said, ‘Okay, I’m sorry.

I apologise, okay?

I was wrong.

I made a mistake.

The blame’s all mine.

I’ll try not to do it again, okay?

Why so much violence?’

She looked him through with blazing eyes,

then looked around at their audience,

and said nothing

until they were heading home in the car,

when she muttered,

‘Love is dead.’

         Reality & My Situation

Of course it wouldn’t last.

I’m gob-smacked that it happened at all,

and not at all surprised that it ended – just like that –

without any credible explanation.

It never seemed to me

to be exactly real, anyway,

other than when

our bodies were touching.

Despite having the experience and skills

for surviving as a lonely old man,

flatlining emotionally

in a loveless existence,

which seems more real and natural, somehow,

readapting to this

was difficult and painful,

and definitely remained a work in progress.

The longer I knew her

the more of a stranger to me

she became,

and the more divorced from reality

the whole situation

seemed to be in my mind.

             Romance & Passion

Now, I really didn’t absolutely need

a tsunami of gooey romantic emotionalism,

or hollered, groaning porn-style pseudo-passion,

but it just didn’t do it for me

when she started cracking jokes

while we were fucking.

              A One-Night Stand

A few days after I’d been to a party

at my friend Alfredo’s house

some time in late 1968,

I received a phone call from a woman

who I didn’t recall actually meeting there

asking me to accompany her

to a blues performance

by Albert King at the Troubadour.

She picked me up in a fairly big car

and drove the long way around

from Echo Park to West Hollywood

via the San Fernando Valley

and over the hills at Laurel Canyon,

smoking pot along the way.

I forget what we talked about –

the blues, I suppose.

Albert King was Albert King.

Then she drove me to her apartment

on the other side of the Hollywood Freeway

from Echo Park, if I remember correctly,

and I’m not sure that I do – after all, she was driving –

where we spent the rest of the night.

What I remember most was how soft and fragrant

her long, teased-out, 60s-Afro-do hair seemed to me.

When we awoke she drove me home

before picking up her son from some relative’s.

She didn’t give me her phone number when I asked for it,

and sadly I never saw her again.

I suppose that I made my psychosocial deficiencies

glaringly obvious to her.

That, or she’d just been in the mood

for a one-night stand

and Alfredo’s wife had suggested me.

                                          Grace

It was 1993.

I had a one-semester contract as a lecturer in International Business –

a second-year lecture course and a graduate seminar course –

at the then still-under-construction

Massey University Albany

in Auckland’s northern suburbs.

I commuted from home and family in Hamilton,

sleeping for two nights weekly at one or another North Shore B&B.

One of the 200 or so students in the undergraduate class

stood out from the rest from the first day.

She wore rimless glasses that seemed to be at least five mm thick,

long, glossy black hair that seemed to glow in the fluorescent lecture hall,

and a flirtatious attitude toward me.

I didn’t imagine this,

even though my marriage was by then

a stay-together-for-the-kids sham.

I mean, what do you call shouting,

‘I love the way you look in tight jeans’

at me from across the campus

during one of my non-teaching prep days

when I was more casually dressed than usual?

Still, despite my heated fantasies,

I was aware of my professional ethics

and the potential shitstorm of making any response at all.

Even when she came to my office after I’d posted the grades

and gave me the full benefits of her leaning-forward cleavage,

I kept my outer cool.

Being able to be with my daughters every day

without having to make legal arrangements

meant more to me than the ego-fluffing delights

of a fling with a rich Chinese woman with thick glasses half my age.

Damn!

            Unworthy of Love

He asked me, in the line of duty,

why my life situation was

so unsatisfactory

in regard to love,

and I told him

– first thought, without reflection –

that it’s because I’m unworthy of love.

Of course, he questioned this,

in an enquiring manner,

whether due to sensitivity or training

I don’t know and it doesn’t matter,

rather than a challenging one.

Ready for a challenge,

I had to make a quick shift in my ready response,

and, though explaining that

I was aware that this was outrageous

and open to withering rational challenge,

it really didn’t matter

how I or anybody else considered it,

I’d been conditioned from earliest childhood

to accept it as axiomatic,

deep down in the essence of who-I-am,

that I’m unworthy of love,

and nothing that I or anybody else says or thinks

can change that.

We also agreed that it’s a self-fulfilling point of view.

I hoped he could show me how I was wrong,

and that there was a way through this,

but of course he couldn’t.

              My Last Wife

She was brilliant,

good-looking,

artistic,

competent at many unusual skills,

and had an arse beyond compare,

but, as is the case

with many brilliant people,

she refused to use her mind

when doing so would have told her

what she didn’t want to acknowledge.

She therefore,

although over 40,

and a doctor who should’ve known better,

continued to chain-smoke

whilst trying to get pregnant

and had a miscarriage

a few weeks after she did.

After that

she had no use for me,

and held her arms up

in front of her torso,

elbows at her waist

and loose fists by her chin

whenever I just

tried to hug her.

When I Needed Her The Most

As her love evaporated

I desperately wanted to know

what I could do or stop doing

or say or stop saying

for her to bring it back to life,

but she wouldn’t tell me.

Meanwhile, the rest of my existence –

work, home, fair-weather friends –

were disappearing

as if by conjurers’ tricks

all over the place.

So I slouched in my chair

with one wine bottle after another,

one codeine tab after another,

staring at nothing

or reading long historical novels

that I don’t remember

while she made her plans

to leave me in that house,

that was nobody’s home,

to sulk without anybody there

to notice me doing it,

let alone care.

          The Joke’s On You-Know-Who

I used to joke that the reason I’m such a pussy

is that you are what you eat.

Since most women tend to find confidence

to be the most attractive feature a man can have,

my being such a pussy has meant

that I haven’t had the pleasure

of engaging in the activity about which I joked

as often in my life as I would have preferred,

and not at all for several years now.

All because I still am

what I used to eat.

Spiritual Stuff

                   Spiritual Reality

The less attention

a person pays

to emotional or cultural or political reality,

or to intellectual or social or psychological reality,

or to financial or economic or mass-media reality,

the more likely that person is

to catch a glimpse of spiritual reality.

That rules religion out.

Maybe sensual and visceral reality could help,

depending,

but I’m not sure.

A windowless room at night

with no lights on

and the door closed

and only a fan whirring 

or some other white noise –

like rain on the roof if I’m lucky –

and limitless red and silver

dots dancing before lightly closed eyes –

stripping away all the bullshit

of day-to-day existence –

that’s the key

to experiencing spiritual reality,

for me.

                       Who Is Anybody?

It was the sixties,

and I was working a Mothers of Invention show

at a club in Philadelphia,

representing Herb Cohen,

Frank Zappa’s manager,

by, among other activities,

keeping an eye on the takings at the entrance

to make sure that the club employees

weren’t engaging in any jiggery-pokery.

One of those club employees

– or maybe he was just a hanger-on –

was a large and pompously self-confident young fellow

who pontificated loudly about matters astrological.

I couldn’t believe it.

This was a Mothers of Invention show,

not some airy-fairy Age-of-Aquarius crap.

I told him to get outta my face with that superstitious bullshit.

He let his voice slip into a patronising tone:

‘Who are you to argue with the stars, brother?’

The only reply that occurred to me was,

‘Who are you to tell me what, if anything, the stars are saying?’

I don’t think he was accustomed to dissent.

    Only Seen In Paintings

Frozen in time,

Quaquidudl doesn’t rest,

perpetually playing out the role

of being continuously

simultaneously both

dangerous and endangered

and

threatening and threatened.

Some may consider Quaquidudl to be sacred,

despite being imaginary,

sorta like God.

                  Mystic Love

He’d already fallen in love with her months before

she told him that she was a psychic.

He took her to the races the next day,

but she couldn’t pick a single winner.

He still loved her anyway, though.

          Testament

Take my photos

Take my LPs

Take my verses

Take my ceviche

Take my perceptions

Take ’em anywhere you feel like.

Take my drawings

Take my CDs

Take my writings

Take my gumbo

Take my reflections

Take ’em anywhere you feel like.

Take my paintings

Take my VCRs

Take my blogposts

Take my gazpacho

Take my emotions

Take ’em anywhere you feel like.

Take my digital imagery

Take my home-made sampler cassettes

Take my unsold and unread novels

Take my buttons and bows

Take my soul-spirit,

if it’s not too slippery

Take ’em anywhere you feel like.

Hide ’em or sell ’em

or hang ’em in my face just beyond my reach:

It’s your decision, not mine

once you’ve taken ’em away.

  Knowledge Of A Sort, I Guess

Those mediaeval kabbalists

who also dabbled in alchemy

might’ve been, well, intelligent men,

but they were also as warped

as plywood left out in the rain

and pathetically deluded as well.

               My Karma, If Any

A mosquito landed on my forearm.

I swatted it.

I guess I’m just not ready

for ahimsa,

but then, neither was it.

                  Pareidolia

I thought I saw Brazil’s flag

in the foliage of the agapanthus

on my front patio.

When I looked again

I could follow

how the play of light and shadow

and the curving of certain leaves

had created the illusion,

and considered the sources

of superstitious people’s

religious visions.

The Spiritual Accuracy of Sacred Texts

The late-spring trees in the park

are dozens of different colours,

but all of them are green,

and none of them the same colour

as the green lawns and playing fields,

the colours of which shift

with the play of sunshine and shadow –

or neon lime fizzy drinks or hair.

Peaches and persimmons,

watermelons and strawberry jam,

pastries and puddings,

chocolate bars and butterscotch-chip cookies,

aspartame and honeycakes,

every commercial flavour of ice cream

all taste different and all are sweet,

just like an infant reaching out, eyes open wide,

for someone to pick her up and hold her,

the heart of a lover,

and exacting revenge over a malicious bully.

People think that their pet sacred books

explain everything about life

and transcendent universal spirituality,

even though they’re all written

in human languages.

                 Sacred Text

When I was 13 or 14 years old,

it struck me that what excerpts I’d read

of the Bible and the Koran,

as people spelt it back then,

were really formulaically simple stuff,

as were such prayers

as those of which I was aware,

and that it’d be no sweat to write something

along those lines myself,

so I decided that it’d be cool

to write my own sacred scriptures,

with accompanying prayerbook,

and become the founder of a great religion.

Never got around to finishing the job, though.

I guess that at that age

I really didn’t know

how much money there’d be in it.